Expansive soils, also known as shrink-swell soils, are soils that exhibit large changes in volume, i.e., that swell and shrink, due to various factors, including moisture content, type and amount of clay minerals, dry density, soil structure, confining pressure and climatic conditions. Both the swelling and the shrinkage of expansive soils can cause severe damage to civil engineering structures, such as pavement structures (e.g., roads, runways, etc.), buildings, embankments, etc. This damage is understood to incur billions of dollars of structural repair and reconstruction work in the U.S. annually.
Effective and efficient methods, apparatuses, and systems for assessing soil for the potential of expansion would be desirable, so that pre-emptive measures for mitigating this problem could be taken with respect to the soil prior to building structures thereon.